


sound in the seashells

by sanvitheartificer



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast), The Adventure Zone - Balance (Podcast)
Genre: A series of short lil scenes set throughout Merle's life about how clerical magic works in taz, Canon Era, Episode: e060-066 The Stolen Century Parts 1-7, Gen, Merle's childhood, Non-Chronological, Religion, clerical magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-27 00:40:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20939429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanvitheartificer/pseuds/sanvitheartificer
Summary: In a world like Faerun, belief is not enough.Or: My thoughts on how a cleric's connection to their God allows them to do magic, feat, the many misadventures of one Merle Hitower Highchurch.





	sound in the seashells

**Author's Note:**

> This is pretty heavily filtered through my own religious experience, which is, uh, Unitarian Universalist? If you do not know of us, it's basically the 'choose your own adventure' of churches. The belief system is 'come talk to us about some stuff you believe in'. This is very different from what I believe Merle experienced, and I tried to make it more Pannish/vaguely Christian flavored when I could, but I think my wishy-washy secularish Romantic roots probably show through.

2\. Pan Camp's a pretty good time, but the weekly 'Wood Meditation' is kind of bullshit. Merle's got it figured out, though. If you wait for thirteen and a half minutes and then head back in, you won't get in trouble with the counselors but you can get to the cafeteria before anyone else and get two desserts.

He leans back against an old pine, arms crossed behind him, eyes half-open. Technically they're supposed to close their eyes and listen to 'the sounds of the forest' today, but Merle thinks that's dumb. Besides, it's quiet out here. Just some stupid birds and crickets and shit.

The late-afternoon light is filtering through the trees, and he can see dust motes floating through a ray of sunshine. The sun's falling on his shoulders, too, and it's the kind of warmth that fills you up from the inside.

Then the warmth gets uncomfortably hot, even though the sun is going down, and Merle blinks. When his eyes shutter open again, he sees a figure with horns and weirdly goat-like legs in silhouette against the dust. Time feels like it's frozen.

A mosquito buzzes past his head and Merle slaps his own ear before he can think. The figure, whatever it was, is gone, and his two-dessert window is disappearing. He gets up and hurries back towards camp.

He only looks back once, but there's nothing there. Just another ordinary, boring clearing in the woods.

3\. “Pan whips up the wildest of storms and fills even the smallest of seashells with their sound. Pan is all there is, and yet we must have faith in Him who has manifested for our most dedicated clerics, the embodiment of true virtue – ”

Merle covers a yawn. Feels like the twelfth sermon this week, and they always say the same shit over and over and over again. Pan, he can't believe he was excited to be old enough to sit through the sermons once.

“Psst, Merle, you wanna sneak out and smoke?”

Merle perks up, and then slumps again, trying not to make it obvious to Mom. There's only one fucker in this church cool enough to figure out Message, and Kat's sitting about two rows behind him.

“Sure,” he whispers. “Meet you in the bathroom.”

Mom rolls her eyes at him later, after he shows up with leaves in his hair and the smell of smoke lingering on his clothes, but he just grins and winks, and she lets it go. Mom's cool like that.

1\. The kid's been trying to cast a basic Light cantrip for five minutes now, and Sherm resists the urge to snigger.

“Now,” they say, in their best woo-woo-druidic voice, “Concentrate – do you see him in front of you? Do you really _believe_, Merle Hitower Highchurch, in the Lord Pan Our God?”

“I – I see him, Sherm,” The baby's voice is practically quivering with religious fervor. Vesper, almost their whole hand stuffed into their mouth and visibly shaking, hands Sherm the water balloon, and they take it, biting their lip hard. “Okay, Merle. I need you to count the hairs on Pan's belly.”

His face screws up in concentration, and Sherm looks at Vesper. Vesper nods. In unison, they slam the balloons down on the kid's head.

There is a moment of perfect silence, and then the kid starts _wailing._ Cackling, Sherm and Vesper escape into the woods.

7\. The two idiots and Merle are walking back from Neverwinter, trying to get somewhere isolated so they can call a fuckin' sphere, when the slime bursts out from under a rock and springs at them. Merle sends a quick prayer to Pan and casts Command.

Or he tries to. The spell more or less goes through, but the slime keeps coming, and then Magnus hits it with a sword, since he didn't learn anything from the damn gerblin cave, and finally Taako incinerates what's now _two_ slimes with a fireball before Merle gets to try anything else.

“What the hell was that, old man,” Taako says, even though the damn fighter didn't do shit, either.

“Not a man,” Merle grumbles, getting to his feet and brushing off the damn robe. Pan only knows why he started wearing this shit.

After that, it isn't much of a walk, but it's getting dark so Merle sparks up a Light for Maggie anyway. The magic flows outta his fingers easy, blue instead of the purple he was trying for but at least it's _something. _

His magic's been fucked since he married Hecuba, and that's just the way it is.

6\. Merle stumbles over a root, almost falling face-first into a tiny stream wending through a slushy clearing, and that's when he realizes he's been walking for hours. His family is sitting up in a warm little cottage by the sea, and he's not fucking there. His shoes are soaked through, his toes and fingers are basically freezing off, and his cigarette's gone cold and soggy.

Merle spits it out onto the ground, and then he picks it up and stuffs it in a pocket, back complaining the whole way. He's not much of a cleric, but there's shit even he can't stoop to.

“Well?” he says, and his voice cracks. He feels like a proud old oak tree, hollowed out by rot and woodpeckers ages ago but too stubborn to keel on over and start making compost for something worth the fuckin' nitrogen. “You gonna strike me down, or what?”

It is deathly, unnaturally quiet, except for his heartbeat pounding in his ears. Merle hardens his jaw and throws his arms up. The pounding swells into a roar like a dam bursting its banks, and magic waterfalls out of him.

It's not Merle, and it is. For a second, Merle is the half-dead snag sprouting anew and growing twice as tall as before, the bluebells and the spring onions and the snowdrops forcing their way through the icy ground, the snow flies and the bluejays suddenly whipped into a mania. And then he's just Merle again, and he windmills backward, sitting down with a thump on a convenient pillock of grass that wasn't there a second ago.

Merle stars at the dancing leaves of an oak which shouldn't be leafed out this early and probably shouldn't be alive, and then he goes and collects some firewood and tries to make something out of the fucking zero supplies he brought.

Merle doesn't think about that night. It's bullshit, is what it is, cause no one is a whole-ass clearing at once, specially not a shitty cleric like Merle.

4\. Merle's deep in the woods, trying to pretend the thing with the bear didn't happen, when he hears a sound like woodpeckers, but worse.

It's that woodchopper again. Last time, mom said he wasn't welcome here, since it was really Enclave land, _Pan's _land. It was horridly disrespectful to chop down Pan's trees in Pan's own country.

But Katie got mauled by a bear and almost died, and Merle doesn't give a fuck what Mom thinks. He shouts, “Hey!”

The guy stops chopping. It's a human man, much taller than most of the Enclave folks Merle knows, and he's carrying an axe in one hand. There's a warhammer propped up against a tree.

“Hey,” he says, simply.

“What are you doing out this far?” Merle says, brandishing his own warhammer.

The man shrugs. “I'm chopping wood. What about you, kiddo? You're not too close to home.”

Merle glowers at him. “Yeah, so?” he snaps. “It's allowed. Not your forest.”

“So it isn't,” says the man. “But that's not why you're out here.” He leans on the axe, and then, considering, picks it up and takes another swing at the tree.

Merle watches him for a minute, til he can't fucking stand it.

“A girl in the Enclave got mauled by a bear,” bursts out of him.

“Sorry to hear it, kid,” says the woodchopper, and keeps chopping. “The woods can be a dangerous place. Good to have a weapon or two.”

“They're not supposed to be!” Merle says, and finally the man turns around again.

“Oh?” He says.

Merle has been burning for days to talk to someone who won't just say “Pan's will is in all things” again, but now that's he got an audience, he has to swallow his nerves. But finally he starts talking, and then it's easy.

“The pastors and the elders are always sayin' Pan's supposed to be everywhere, live in seashells and send the fuckin' seagulls to Heaven, but... but where was he when Katie was getting' clawed up? Bears are supposed to be Pan, 'our Pannite siblings', they always say that shit, so what does that mean, that Katie fucked up so God punished her? She's _nice_! She always leads prayers and finds cool shit in the woods and she made me a scarf once!” Merle swings his warhammer at thin air, wishing he could bring down rain and thunder to match his mood. It is a perfect, clear day.

The man just watches him, not blinking for so long that Merle feels like squirming out of his skin. Finally he says, “Kid, I'm gonna give you some free advice. I'm not too religious, but we all know the gods 're out there, partyin' on their fancy mountains. But that doesn't mean they give a damn what you have for supper, or if you kick some asshole puppy. Pan probably doesn't know your friend from the bear what mauled her.”

Merle's so relieved he could kiss him, and so guilty he could swing the warhammer through his head. It's what he wanted to hear, and he _hates _it. Before he can work out how he feels, the man gestures at his warhammer.

“You know how to use that thing? A weapon you don't know how to use is more dangerous'n no weapon at all.”

“Wh – no,” Merle admits. “Mom just got it for me last Candlenights.”

“Come back here next week. I'll teach you a few things.”

5\. The service is over and Merle's thinking about whether he should go back to the ship or stay in the church tonight when he notices the kid.

“Pastor Highchurch?”

“Call me Merle, kiddo,” Merle says, lowering to a crouch with a grunt. He's face to face with the kid, now, not that face-to-face means much on this planet.

Merle still hasn't gotten used to seeing kids in gas masks. Wearing it, sure, it got annoying real fast, but you kinda learned how to tune it out. But kids... kids should be able to fuck around in the woods. They should wanna skip church to go smoke weed, not sit up in the front row all attentive like his bullshit really meant something to them.

But here he is, and here's the kid, so he's gotta pretend like his bullshit means something, after all.

“Thanks, Pastor Merle,” the kid says, shy as anything. They're all painful, earnest hope, and it makes something in Merle ache. “How do you know Pan is real?”

Merle swallows. “Well, kiddo, he – he gives me magic, don't he?” He sparks up a little Light, bright purple like the skies of a world he's left far behind, and the kid giggles. But obviously it's not enough. There's wizards, warlocks, bards, sorcerers, even, on this plane. Magic doesn't mean shit.

“Pan's there in you. When ya look up at the sky, or... the fire of a flamethrower, that's Pan, right there with you, fighting back the darkness! Nature can be shitty mushrooms, sure, but it's also the plants sprouting back from the burnt ground. It's _life_, and life's stronger than any of the bullshit that wants to hold it down.”

The kid just looks up at him, stars in their eyes, and then they press a rock into his hand and run away.

Merle cups the rock. It's clear and glittering with purple flakes, and when you squint it's the same color as the celestial plane from far away. The kid's clearly had it for a long time, because all its rough edges are smoothed out and chipped away, and it's not the kind of rock he sees around here, usually.

He tucks it into his breast pocket, and ages later, he still has it, a rock from a plane and a child he may never see again, lumpy and small and perfect.

8\. Gods aren't people.

Merle gets that, in a way he thinks maybe other clerics don't. He's been through it all, the bullshit teenage angst, the unthinking belief when he was _real _young, trying to preach to new people, new planets on the Starblaster. Trying to show 'em Pan.

Everyone on the planet knows the gods exist. But belief isn't just knowing, not even just feeling in your heart that somewhere out there, someone gives a fuck if you live or die.

Belief's knowing you _are_ Pan. Water pounds through your veins, and your brain's made of starstuff. The food you eat, the air in your lungs, all that shit's nature. All that shit's _Pan_.

You are what you believe in. Pan's out there, Pan puts the sound in every seashell, and Pan's in you.

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as a prompt from Charm, to whom I'm quite grateful! also, thanks to Katie, Kat, Sherm, and Vesper for letting me use your names to do some really dumb shit. 
> 
> I'm not sure I really succeeded in being clear, even to myself, about how this works or what this looks like, but that kind of feels fitting, so maybe it's okay! (You can tell I'm UU because i want to have a very clear and scientific understanding of *faith and religion and spirituality*. makes sense, sanvi!) 
> 
> anyway, love yall. thanks for reading. if you want to come bug me, i'm on tumblr @windywords123.


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